The Crimes of Mena

The Suppressed Article

This is the article which had been scheduled to appear in the Washington
Post. After having cleared the legal department for all possible questions of
inaccurate statements, the article was scheduled for publication when just as
the presses were set to roll, Washington Post Managing Editor Bob Kaiser (Like
George Bush, a member of the infamous "Skull & Bones Fraternity), killed the
article without explanation. According to the sidebar which appeared with the
Penthouse Magazine version of this story, Bob Kaiser refused to even meet with
Sally Denton and Roger Morris, hiding in his office while his secretary made
excuses.

This is the story that couldn't be suppressed. An investigative report into
a scandal that haunts the reputations of three presidents - Reagan, Bush, and
Clinton.

THE CRIMES OF MENA

By Sally Denton and Roger Morris

Barry Seal - gunrunner, drug trafficker, and covert C.I.A. operative
extraordinaire - is hardly a familiar name in American politics. But nine years
after he was murdered in a hail of bullets by Medellin cartel hit men outside a
Salvation Army shelter in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, he has come back to haunt the
reputations of three American presidents.

Seal's legacy includes more than 2,000 newly discovered documents that now
verify and quantify much of what previously had been only suspicion, conjecture,
and legend. The documents confirm that from 1981 to his brutal death in 1986,
Barry Seal carried on one of the most lucrative, extensive, and brazen
operations in the history of the international drug trade, and that he did it
with the evident complicity, if not collusion, of elements of the United States
government, apparently with the acquiescence of Ronald Reagan's administration,
impunity from any subsequent exposure by George Bush's administration, and under
the usually acute political nose of then Arkansas governor Bill Clinton.

The newly unearthed papers show the real Seal as far more impressive and
well-connected than the character played by Dennis Hopper in a made-for-TV movie
some years ago, loosely based on the smuggler's life. The film portrayed the
pudgy pilot as a hapless victim, caught in a cross fire between bungling but
benign government agencies and Latin drug lords. The truth sprinkled through the
documents is a richer - and altogether more sinister - matter of national and
individual corruption. It is a tale of massive, socially devastating crime, of
what seems to have been an official cover-up to match, and, not least, of the
strange reluctance of so-called mainstream American journalism to come to grips
with the phenomenon and its ominous implications - even when the documentary
evidence had appeared.

The trail winds back to another slightly bruited but obscure name - a small
place in western Arkansas called Mena.

Of the many stories emerging from the Arkansas of the 1980s that was crucible
to the Clinton presidency, none has been more elusive than the charges
surrounding Mena. Nestled in the dense pine and hardwood forests of the Ouachita
Mountains, some 160 miles west of Little Rock, once thought a refuge for
nineteenth-century border outlaws and even a hotbed of Depression-era
anarchists, the tiny town has been the locale for persistent reports of drug
smuggling, gunrunning, and money laundering tracing to the early eighties, when
Seal based his aircraft at Mena's Intermountain Regional Airport.

From first accounts circulating locally in Arkansas, the story surfaced
nationally as early as 1989 in a *Penthouse* article called "Snowbound," written
by the investigative reporter John Cummings, and in a Jack Anderson column, but
was never advanced at the time by other media. Few reporters covering Clinton in
the 1992 campaign missed hearing at least something about Mena. But it was
obviously a serious and demanding subject - the specter of vast drug smuggling
with C.I.A. involvement - and none of the major media pursued it seriously
During 1992, the story was kept alive by Sarah McClendon, *The Nation*, and *The
Village Voice*.

Then, after Clinton became president, Mena began to reappear. Over the past
year, CBS News and *The Wall Street Journal* have reported the original,
un-quieted charges surrounding Mena, including the shadow of some C.l.A. (or
"national security") involvement in the gun and drug traffic, and the apparent
failure of then governor Clinton to pursue evidence of such international crime
so close to home.

"Seal was smuggling drugs and kept his planes at Mena," *The Wall Street
Journal* reported in 1994. "He also acted as an agent for the D.E.A. In one of
these missions, he flew the plane that produced photographs of Sandinistas
loading drugs in Nicaragua. He was killed by a drug gang [Medellin cartel hit
men] in Baton Rouge. The cargo plane he flew was the same one later flown by
Eugene Hasenfus when he was shot down over Nicaragua with a load of contra
supplies.

In a mix of wild rumor and random fact, Mena has also been a topic of
ubiquitous anti-Clinton diatribes circulated by right-wing extremists - an irony
in that the Mena operation was the apparent brainchild of the two previous and
Republican administrations.

Still, most of the larger American media have continued to ignore, if not
ridicule, the Mena accusations. Finding no conspiracy in the Ouachita's last July,
a *Washington Post* reporter typically scoffed at the "alleged dark deeds,"
contrasting Mena with an image as "Clan destination, Arkansas ... Cloak and
Dagger Capital of America." Noting that *The New York Times* had "mentioned Mena
primarily as the headquarters of the American Rock Garden Society," the
*Columbia Journalism Review* in a recent issue dismissed "the conspiracy
theories" as of "dubious relevance."

A former Little Rock businessman, Terry Reed, has coauthored with John
Cummings a highly controversial book, Compromised: Clinton, Bush, and the
C.I.A.,
which describes a number of covert activities around Mena, including a C.I.A.
operation to train pilots and troops for the Nicaraguan Contras, and the
collusion of local officials. Both the book and its authors were greeted with
derision.

Now, however, a new mass of documentary evidence has come to light regarding
just such "dark deeds" - previously private and secret records that substantiate
as never before some of the worst and most portentous suspicions about what went
on at Mena, Arkansas, a decade ago.

Given the scope and implications of the Mena story, it may be easy to
understand the media's initial skepticism and reluctance. But it was never so
easy to dismiss the testimony arid suspicions of some of those close to the
matter: Internal Revenue Service Agent Bill Duncan, Arkansas State Police
investigator Russell Welch, Arkansas Attorney General J. Winston Bryant,
Congressman Bill Alexander, and various other local law-enforcement officials
and citizens.

All of these people were convinced by the late eighties that there existed
what Bryant termed "credible evidence" of the most serious criminal activity
involving Mena between 1981 and 1986. They also believed that the crimes were
committed with the acquiescence, if not the complicity, of elements of the U.S.
government. But they couldn't seem to get the national media to pay attention.

During the 1992 campaign, outside advisers and aides urged former California
governor Jerry Brown to raise the Mena issue against Clinton - at least to ask
why the Arkansas governor had not done more about such serious international
crime so close to home. But Brown, too, backed away from the subject. I'll raise
it if the major media break it first," he told aides. "The media will do it,
Governor," one of them replied in frustration, "if only you'll raise it."

Mena's obscure airport was thought by the I.R.S., the F.B.I., U.S. Customs,
and the Arkansas State Police to be a base for Adler Berriman "Barry" Seal, a
self-confessed, convicted smuggler whose operations had been linked to the
intelligence community. Duncan and Welch both spent years building cases against
Seal and others for drug smuggling and money laundering around Mena, only to see
their own law-enforcement careers damaged in the process.

What evidence they gathered, they have said in testimony and other public
statements, was not sufficiently pursued by the then U.S. attorney for the
region, J. Michael Fitzhugh, or by the I.R.S., Arkansas State Police, and other
agencies. Duncan, testifying before the joint investigation by the Arkansas
state attorney general's office and the United States Congress in June 1991,
said that 29 federal indictments drafted in a Mena-based money-laundering scheme
had gone unexplored. Fitzhugh, responding at the time to Duncan's charges, said,
"This office has not slowed up any investigation ... [and] has never been under
any pressure in any investigation."

By 1992, to Duncan's and Welch's mounting dismay, several other official
inquiries into the alleged Mena connection were similarly ineffectual or were
stifled altogether, furthering their suspicions of government collusion and
cover-up. In his testimony before Congress, Duncan said the I.R.S. "withdrew
support for the operations" and further directed him to "withhold information
from Congress and perjure myself."

Duncan later testified that he had never before experienced "anything
remotely akin to this type of interference.... Alarms were going off," he
continued, "and as soon as Mr. Fitzhugh got involved, he was more aggressive in
not allowing the subpoenas and in interfering in the investigative process."

State policeman Russell Welch felt he was "probably the most knowledgeable
person" regarding the activities at Mena, yet he was not initially subpoenaed to
testify before the grand jury. Welch testified later that the only reason he was
ultimately subpoenaed at all was because one of the grand jurors was from Mena
and "told the others that if they wanted to know something about the Mena
airport, they ought to ask that guy [Welch] out there in the hall."

State Attorney General Bryant, in a 1991 letter to the office of Lawrence
Walsh, the independent counsel in the Iran-Contra investigation, wondered "why
no one was prosecuted in Arkansas despite a mountain of evidence that Seal was
using Arkansas as his principle staging area during the years 1982 through
1985."

What actually went on in the woods of western Arkansas? The question is still
relevant for what it may reveal about certain government operations during the
time that Reagan and Bush were in the White House and Clinton was governor of
Arkansas.

In a mass of startling new documentation - the more than 2,000 papers
gathered by the authors from private and law-enforcement sources in a year-long
nationwide search - answers are found and serious questions are posed.

These newly unearthed documents - the veritable private papers of Barry Seal
- substantiate at least part of what went on at Mena.

What might be called the Seal archive dates back to 1981, when Seal began his
operations at the Intermountain Regional Airport in Mena. The archive, all of it
now in our possession, continues beyond February 1986, when Seal was murdered by
Colombian assassins after he had testified in federal court in Las Vegas, Fort
Lauderdale, and Miami for the U.S. government against leaders of the Medellin
drug cartel.

The papers include such seemingly innocuous material as Seal's bank and
telephone records; negotiable instruments, promissory notes, and invoices;
personal correspondence address and appointment books; bills of sale for
aircraft and boats; aircraft registration, and modification work orders.

In addition, the archive also contains personal diaries; handwritten to-do
lists and other private notes; secretly tape-recorded conversations; and
cryptographic keys and legends for codes used in the Seal operation.

Finally, there are extensive official records: federal investigative and
surveillance reports, accounting assessments by the I.R.S. and the D.E.A., and
court proceedings not previously reported in the press - testimony as well as
confidential pre-sentencing memoranda in federal narcotics-trafficking trials in
Florida and Nevada - numerous depositions, and other sworn statements.

The archive paints a vivid portrait not only of a major criminal conspiracy
around Mena, but also of the unmistakable shadow of government complicity. Among
the new revelations:

Mena, from 1981 to 1985, was indeed one of the centers for international
smuggling traffic. According to official I.R.S. and D.E.A. calculations, sworn
court testimony, and other corroborative records, the traffic amounted to
thousands of kilos of cocaine and heroin and literally hundreds of millions of
dollars in drug profits. According to a 1986 letter from the Louisiana attorney
general to then U.S. attorney general Edwin Meese, Seal "smuggled between $3
billion and $5 billion of drugs into the U.S."

Seal himself spent considerable sums to land, base, maintain, and specially
equip or refit his aircraft for smuggling. According to personal and business
records, he had extensive associations at Mena and in Little Rock, and was in
nearly constant telephone contact with Mena when he was not there himself. Phone
records indicate Seal made repeated calls to Mena the day before his murder.
This was long after Seal, according to his own testimony, was working as an
$800,000-a-year informant for the federal government.

A former member of the Army Special Forces, Seal had ties to the Central
Intelligence Agency dating to the early 1970s. He had confided to relatives and
others, according to their sworn statements, that he was a C.I.A. operative
before and during the period when he established his operations at Mena. In one
statement to Louisiana State Police, a Seal relative said, "Barry was into
gunrunning and drug smuggling in Central and South America ... and he had done
some time in El Salvadore [sic]." Another then added, "lt was true, but at the
time Barry was working for the C.I.A."

In a posthumous jeopardy-assessment case against Seal - also documented in
the archive - the I.R.S. determined that money earned by Seal between 1984 and
1986 was not illegal because of his "C.I.A.-D.E.A. employment." The only public
official acknowledgment of Seal's relationship to the C.I.A. has been in court
and congressional testimony, and in various published accounts describing the
C.I.A.'s installation of cameras in Seal's C-123K transport plane, used in a
highly celebrated 1984 sting operation against the Sandinista regime in
Nicaragua.

Robert Joura, the assistant special agent in charge of the D.E.A.'s Houston
office and the agent who coordinated Seal's undercover work, told *The
Washington Post* last year that Seal was enlisted by the C.I.A. for one
sensitive mission - providing photographic evidence that the Sandinistas were
letting cocaine from Colombia move through Nicaragua. A spokesman for then
Senate candidate Oliver North told *The Post* that North had been kept aware of
Seal's work through "intelligence sources."

Federal Aviation Administration registration records contained in the archive
confirm that aircraft identified by federal and state narcotics agents as in the
Seal smuggling operation were previously owned by Air America, Inc., widely
reported to have been a C.I.A. proprietary company. Emile Camp, one of Seal's
pilots and a witness to some of his most significant dealings, was killed on a
mountainside near Mena in 1985 in the unexplained crash of one of those planes
that had once belonged to Air America.

According to still other Seal records, at least some of the aircraft in his
smuggling fleet, which included a Lear jet, helicopters, and former U.S.
military transports, were also outfitted with avionics and other equipment by
yet another company in turn linked to Air America.

Among the aircraft flown in and out of Mena was Seal's C-123K cargo plane,
christened Fat Lady. The records show that Fat Lady, serial number 54-0679, was
sold by Seal months before his death. According to other files, the plane soon
found its way to a phantom company of what became known in the Iran-Contra
scandal as "the Enterprise," the C.I.A.-related secret entity managed by Oliver
North and others to smuggle illegal weapons to the Nicaraguan Contra rebels.
According to former D.E.A. agent Celerino Castillo and others, the aircraft was
allegedly involved in a return traffic in cocaine, profits from which were then
used to finance more clandestine gunrunning.

F.A.A. records show that in October 1986, the same Fat Lady was shot down
over Nicaragua with a load of arms destined for the Contras. Documents found on
board the aircraft and seized by the Sandinistas included logs linking the plane
with Area 51 - the nation's top-secret nuclear-weapons facility at the Nevada
Test Site. The doomed aircraft was co-piloted by Wallace Blaine "Buzz" Sawyer, a
native of western Arkansas, who died in the crash. The admissions of the
surviving crew member, Eugene Hasenfus, began a public unraveling of the
Iran-Contra episode.

An Arkansas gun manufacturer testified in 1993 in federal court in
Fayetteville that the C.I.A. contracted with him to build 250 automatic pistols
for the Mena operation. William Holmes testified that he had been introduced to
Seal in Mena by a C.I.A. operative, and that he then sold weapons to Seal. Even
though he was given a Department of Defense purchase order for guns fitted with
silencers, Holmes testified that he was never paid the $140,000 the government
owed him. "After the Hasenfus plane was shot down," Holmes said, "you couldn't
find a soul around Mena."

Meanwhile, there was still more evidence that Seal's massive smuggling
operation based in Arkansas had been part of a C.I.A. operation, and that the
crimes were continuing well after Seal's murder. In 1991 sworn testimony to both
Congressman Alexander and Attorney General Bryant, state police investigator
Welch recorded that in 1987 he had documented "new activity at the [Mena]
airport with the appearance of ... an Australian business [a company linked with
the C.I.A.], and C-130s had appeared...."

At the same time, according to Welch, two F.B.I. agents officially informed
him that the C.I.A. "had something going on at the Mena Airport involving
Southern Air Transport [another company linked with the C.I.A.] ... and they
didn't want us [the Arkansas State Police] to screw it up like we had the last
one."

The hundreds of millions in profits generated by the Seal trafficking via
Mena and other outposts resulted in extraordinary banking and business practices
in apparent efforts to launder or disperse the vast amounts of illicit money in
Arkansas and elsewhere. Seal's financial records show from the early eighties,
for example, instances of daily deposits of $50,000 or more, and extensive use
of an offshore foreign bank in the Caribbean, as well as financial institutions
in Arkansas and Florida.

According to I.R.S. criminal investigator Duncan, secretaries at the Mena
Airport told him that when Seal flew into Mena, there would be stacks of cash
to be taken to the bank and laundered." One secretary told him that she was
ordered to obtain numerous cashier's checks, each in an amount just under
$10,000, at various banks in Mena and surrounding communities, to avoid filing
the federal Currency Transaction Reports required for all bank transactions that
exceed that limit.

Bank tellers testified before a federal grand jury that in November 1982, a
Mena airport employee carried a suitcase containing more than $70,000 into a
bank. "The bank officer went down the teller lines handing out the stacks of
$1,000 bills and got the cashier's checks."

Law-enforcement sources confirmed that hundreds of thousands of dollars were
laundered from 1981 to 1983 just in a few small banks near Mena, and that
millions more from Seal's operation were laundered elsewhere in Arkansas and the
nation.

Spanish-language documents in Seal's possession at the time of his murder
also indicate that he had accounts throughout Central America and was planning
to set up his own bank in the Caribbean.

Additionally, Seal's files suggest a grandiose scheme for building an empire.
Papers in his office at the time of his death include references to dozens of
companies, all of which had names that began with Royale. Among them: Royale
Sports, Royale Television Network, Royale Liquors, Royale Casino, S.A., Royale
Pharmaceuticals, Royale Arabians, Royale Seafood, Royale Security, Royale
Resorts ... and on and on.

Seal was scarcely alone in his extensive smuggling operation based in Mena
from 1981 to 1986, commonly described in both federal and state law-enforcement
files as one of the largest drug-trafficking operations in the United States at
the time, if not in the history of the drug trade. Documents show Seal confiding
on one occasion that he was "only the transport," pointing to an extensive
network of narcotics distribution and finance in Arkansas and other states.
After drugs were smuggled across the border, the duffel bags of cocaine would be
retrieved by helicopters and dropped onto flatbed trucks destined for various
American cities.

In recognition of Seal's significance in the drug trade, government
prosecutors made him their chief witness in various cases, including a 1985
Miami trial in absentia of Medellln drug lords; in another 1985 trial of what
federal officials regarded as the largest narcotics-trafficking case to date in
Las Vegas; and in still a third prosecution of corrupt officials in the Turks
and Caicos Islands. At the same time, court records and other documents reveal a
studied indifference by government prosecutors to Seal's earlier and ongoing
operations at Mena.

In the end, the Seal documents are vindication for dedicated officials in
Arkansas like agents Duncan and Welch and local citizens' groups like the
Arkansas Committee, whose own evidence and charges take on new gravity - and
also for *The Nation*, *The Village Voice*, the Association of National Security
Alumni, the venerable Washington journalists Sarah McClendon and Jack Anderson,
Arkansas. reporters Rodney Bowers and Mara Leveritt, and others who kept an
all-too-authentic story alive amid wider indifference.

But now the larger implications of the newly exposed evidence seem as
disturbing as the criminal enormity it silhouettes. Like his modern freebooter's
life, Seal's documents leave the political and legal landscape littered with
stark questions.

What, for example, happened to some nine different official investigations
into Mena after 1987, from allegedly compromised federal grand juries to
congressional inquiries suppressed by the National Security Council in 1988
under Ronald Reagan to still later Justice Department inaction under George
Bush?

Officials repeatedly invoked national security to quash most of the
investigations. Court documents do show clearly that the C.I.A. and the D.E.A.
employed Seal during 1984 and 1985 for the Reagan administration's celebrated
sting attempt to implicate the Nicaraguan Sandinista regime in cocaine
trafficking.

According to a December 1988 Senate Foreign Relations Committee report,
"cases were dropped. The apparent reason was that the prosecution might have
revealed national-security information, even though all of the crimes which were
the focus of the investigation occurred before Seal became a federal informant."

Tax records show that, having assessed Seal posthumously for some $86 million
in back taxes on his earnings from Mena and elsewhere between 1981 and 1983,
even the I.R.S. forgave the taxes on hundreds of millions in known drug and gun
profits over the ensuing two-year period when Seal was officially admitted to be
employed by the government.

To follow the l.R.S. Iogic, what of the years, crimes, and profits at Mena in
the early eighties, before Barry Seal became an acknowledged federal operative,
as well as the subsequently reported drug-trafficking activities at Mena even
after his murder - crimes far removed from his admitted cooperation as
government informant and witness?

"Joe [name deleted] works for Seal and cannot be touched because Seal works
for the C.I.A.," a Customs official said in an Arkansas investigation into drug
trafficking during the early eighties. "A C.I.A. or D.E.A. operation is taking
place at the Mena airport," an F.B.I. telex advised the Arkansas State Police in
August 1987, 18 months after Seal's murder. Welch later testified that a Customs
agent told him, "Look, we've been told not to touch anything that has Barry
Seal's name on it, just to let it go."

*The London Sunday Telegraph* recently reported new evidence, including a
secret code number, that Seal was also working as an operative of the Defense
Intelligence Agency during the period of the gunrunning and drug smuggling.

Perhaps most telling is what is so visibly missing from the voluminous files.
In thousands of pages reflecting a man of meticulous organization and planning, Barry Seal seems to have felt singularly and utterly secure - if not
somehow invulnerable - at least in the ceaseless air transport and delivery into
the United States of tons of cocaine for more than five years. In a 1986 letter
to the D.E.A., the commander and deputy commander of narcotics for the Louisiana
State Police say that Seal "was being given apparent free rein to import drugs
in conjunction with D.E.A. investigations with so little restraint and control
on his actions as to allow him the opportunity to import drugs for himself
should he have been so disposed."

Seal's personal videotapes, in the authors' possession, show one scene in
which he used U.S. Army paratroop equipment, as well as military like precision,
in his drug-transporting operation. Then, in the middle of the afternoon after a
number of dry runs, one of his airplanes dropped a load of several duffel bags
attached to a parachute. Within seconds, the cargo sitting on the remote grass
landing strip was retrieved by Seal and loaded onto a helicopter that had
followed the low-flying aircraft. "This is the first daylight cocaine drop in
the history of the state of Louisiana," Seal narrates on the tape. If the duffel
bags seen in the smuggler's home movies were filled with cocaine - as Seal
himself states on tape - that single load would have been worth hundreds of
millions of dollars.

Perhaps the videos were not of an actual cocaine drop, but merely the drug
trafficker's training video for his smuggling organization, or even a test
maneuver. Regardless, the films show a remarkable, fearless invincibility. Barry
Seal was not expecting apprehension.

His most personal papers show him all but unconcerned about the very flights
and drops that would indeed have been protected or "fixed," according to
law-enforcement sources, by the collusion of U.S. intelligence.

In an interview with agent Duncan, Seal brazenly "admitted that he had been a
drug smuggler."

If the Seal documents show anything, an attentive reader might conclude, it
is that ominous implication of some official sanction. Over the entire episode
looms the unmistakable shape of government collaboration in vast drug
trafficking and gunrunning, and in a decade-long cover-up of criminality.

Government investigators apparently had no doubt about the magnitude of those
crimes. According to Customs sources, Seal's operations at Mena and other bases
were involved in the export of guns to Bolivia, Argentina, Peru, and Brazil, as
well as to the Contras, and the importation of cocaine from Colombia to be sold
in New York, Chicago, Detroit, St. Louis, and other cities, as well as in
Arkansas itself.

Duncan and his colleagues knew that Seal's modus operandi included dumping
most of the drugs in other southern states, so that what Arkansas agents
witnessed in Mena was but a tiny fragment of an operation staggering in its
magnitude. Yet none of the putative inquiries seems to have made a serious
effort to gather even a fraction of the available Seal documents now assembled
and studied by the authors.

Finally, of course, there are somber questions about then governor Clinton's
own role vis-a-vis the crimes of Mena.

Clinton has acknowledged learning officially about Mena only in April 1988,
though a state police investigation had been in progress for several years. As
the state's chief executive, Clinton often claimed to be fully abreast of such
inquiries. In his one public statement on the matter as governor, in September
1991 he spoke of that investigation finding "linkages to the federal
government," and "all kinds of questions about whether he [Seal] had any links
to the C.l.A.... and if that backed into the Iran-Contra deal."

But then Clinton did not offer further support for any inquiry, "despite the
fact," as Bill Plante and Michael Singer of CBS News have written, "that a
Republican administration was apparently sponsoring a Contra-aid operation in
his state and protecting a smuggling ring that flew tons of cocaine through
Arkansas."

As recently as March 1995, Arkansas state trooper Larry Patterson testified
under oath, according to *The London Sunday Telegraph*, that he and other
officers "discussed repeatedly in Clinton's presence" the "large quantities of
drugs being flown into the Mena airport, large quantities of money, large
quantities of guns," indicating that Clinton may have known much more about
Seal's activities than he has admitted.

Moreover, what of the hundreds of millions generated by Seal's Mena
contraband? The Seal records reveal his dealings with at least one major Little
Rock bank. How much drug money from him or his associates made its way into
criminal laundering in Arkansas's notoriously freewheeling financial
institutions and bond houses, some of which are reportedly under investigation
by the Whitewater special prosecutor for just such large, unaccountable
infusions of cash and unexplained transactions?

"The state offers an enticing climate for traffickers," I.R.S. agents had
concluded by the end of the eighties, documenting a "major increase" in the
amount of large cash and bank transactions in Arkansas after 1985, despite a
struggling local economy.

Meanwhile, prominent backers of Clinton's over the same years - including
bond broker and convicted drug dealer Dan Lasater and chicken tycoon Don Tyson -
have themselves been subjects of extensive investigative and surveillance files
by the D.E.A. or the F.B.I. similar to those relating to Seal, including
allegations of illegal drug activity that Tyson has recently acknowledged
publicly and denounced as "totally false." "This may be the first president in
history with such close buddies who have NADDIS numbers," says one concerned
law-enforcement official, referring to the Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs
Intelligence System numbers assigned those under protracted investigation for
possible drug crimes.

The Seal documents are still more proof that for Clinton, the Arkansas of the
eighties and the company he kept there will not soon disappear as a political or
even constitutional liability.

"I've always felt we never got the whole story there," Clinton said in 1991.

Indeed. But as president of the United States, he need no longer wonder - and
neither should the nation. On the basis of the Seal documents (copies of which
are being given to the Whitewater special prosecutor in any case), the president
should ask immediately for a full report on the matter from the C.I.A., the
D.E.A., the F.B.I., the Justice Department, and other relevant agencies of his
own administration - including the long-buried evidence gathered by I.R.S. agent
Duncan and Arkansas state police investigator Welch. President Clinton should
also offer full executive-branch cooperation with a reopened congressional
inquiry, and expose the subject fully for what it says of both the American past
and future.

Seal saw himself as a patriot to the end. He had dictated his own epitaph for
his grave in Baton Rouge: "A rebel adventurer the likes of whom in previous days
made America great." In a sense his documents may now render that claim less
ironic than it seems.

The tons of drugs that Seal and his associates brought into the country,
officials agree, affected tens of thousands of lives at the least, and exacted
an incalculable toll on American society. And for the three presidents, the
enduring questions of political scandal are once again apt: What did they know
about Mena? When did they know it? Why didn't they do anything to stop it?

The crimes of Mena were real. That much is now documented beyond doubt. The
only remaining issues are how far they extended, and who was responsible.

From the July 1995 issue of *Penthouse*

Ambrose Evens-Pritchard On The Above

THE LONDON SUNDAY TELEGRAPH
29 JANUARY 1995
ARKANSAS DRUG EXPOSE MISSES THE
POST
BY AMBROSE EVANS-PRITCHARD IN
WASHINGTON
IT MIGHT almost be called The Greatest Story Never
Told. The article was typeset and scheduled to run in
today's edition of The Washington Post.
It had the enthusiastic backing of the editors and staff
of the Sunday Outlook section, where it was to appear
after eleven weeks of soul-searching and debate.
Lawyers had gone through the text line by line.
Supporting documents had been examined with
meticulous care. The artwork and illustrations had been
completed. The contract with the authors had been
signed. Leonard Downie, the executive editor of the
newspaper, had given his final assent.
But on Thursday morning the piece was cancelled. It
had been delayed before - so often, in fact, that its
non-appearance was becoming the talk of Washington -
but this time the authors were convinced that the story
was doomed and would never make it into the pages of
what is arguably the worlds most powerful political
newspaper. They have withdrawn it in disgust, accusing
the Post of a cover-up of the biggest scandal in
American history.
In stark contrast, the managing editor, Robert Kaiser,
left a message on my answering machine saying that
there was really nothing to "this non-existent story".
In a subsequent conversation, he dismissed the article
as a reprise of rumors and allegations. "I am confident
that it doesn't have any great new revelations," he said.
Others are less confident. A copy of the article passed
to The Sunday Telegraph - not, it should be stressed,
by its authors - appears to be absolutely explosive.
Based on an archive of more than 2,000 documents, it
says that western Arkansas was a center of international
drug smuggling in the early 1980s - perhaps even the
headquarters of the biggest drug trafficking operation in
history. It asks whether hundreds of millions of dollars
in profits made their way "into criminal laundering in
Arkansas's notoriously free-wheeling financial
institutions and bond houses".
The activities were mixed up with a U.S. intelligence
operation at the Mena airport in Arkansas that was
smuggling weapons to the Nicaraguan Contras.
Bill Clinton is not specifically accused of involvement,
but he was Governor of Arkansas at the time. The piece
also notes that some of his prominent backers had been
the subject of extensive investigation by the Drug
Enforcement Administration and the FBI, and had been
assigned files in NADDIS - the Narcotics & Dangerous
Drugs Intelligence System.
The article makes clear that the alleged scandal is not
confined to the activities of the Arkansas political
machine and Mr. Clinton. It embraces the highest levels
of the federal government over several years. "For three
Presidents of both parties - Messrs. Reagan, Bush and
Clinton - the old enduring questions of political scandal
are once again apt," the article concludes. "What did
they know about Mena? When did they know it? Why
didn't they do anything to stop it?"
It is clear that The Washington Post took the article
extremely seriously. It was to be run at full length -
roughly 4,000 words, taking up several pages in an
almost unprecedented spread across the Sunday
Outlook section.
The authors, Dr. Roger Morris and Sally Denton, were
told that they were being offered the highest fee ever
paid for a contribution to Outlook. They are veteran
investigators with established reputations. Morris
worked for the National Security Council staff at the
White House during the Johnson and Nixon
Administrations. He has taught at Harvard and has
written a series of acclaimed books on foreign policy.
Denton is the former head of news agency UPI's
special investigative unit, and is the author of the
Bluegrass Conspiracy, which exposed the involvement
of Kentucky political and law enforcement figures in an
international arms and drug smuggling ring.
Their research is concentrated on the activities of Barry
Seal, a legendary smuggler who operated from a
company called Rich Mountain Aviation in the
Ouachita Mountains west of Little Rock.
They have his bank and telephone records, invoices,
appointment books, handwritten notes, personal diaries
and secretly-recorded conversations, as well as
extensive police records and surveillance reports.
Among other allegations they make are:
- Seal was using his fleet of aircraft to export weapons
to Bolivia, Argentina and Brazil in addition to the
Nicaraguan Contras.
- The planes were carrying cocaine back up to
Arkansas on the return journey for sale in New
York, Chicago, Detroit, St. Louis and other cities.
- Seal had ties to the CIA and felt that he could
smuggle with impunity.
- Nine separate attempts to investigate Mena, by
both state and federal authorities, were stymied.
"Over the entire episode looms the unmistakable
dark shape of U.S. government complicity in vast
drug trafficking and gun-running," the article says.
The broad picture is not new to readers of The Sunday
Telegraph [DSO - thanks to the heroic efforts of the
author of this article], which published a story making
some of the same points on October 9th last year. [DSO
- headlined "Smugglers Linked to Contra Arms Deals",
that article, also by Evans-Pritchard, is partially
displayed with caption with the present article]. The
Wall Street Journal has also done original reporting on
the subject.
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